Fitting for Obama to speak in Gettysburg (Editorial)

As of Monday afternoon, there was still no official word on President Obama's expected speech at Gettysburg next month, but the Park Service says it's preparing for a presidential visit.

Senators Bob Casey Jr. and Pat Toomey, as well as Scott Perry, who represents York and Adams counties in Congress, earlier this year invited the president to speak at a ceremony in Gettysburg to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's celebrated remarks.

A lot of folks this week blame the current president for the closure of national parks, including Gettysburg, during the recent government shutdown. Congressional Republicans must take the blame for the shutdown itself, but the padlocking of parks was a political calculation that backfired on the president. Still, of the 24 presidents who have visited Gettysburg, perhaps none is more proper and fitting than Obama, the nation's first black commander in chief.

Although the Civil War started as a war against secession, it evolved into a struggle against slavery as well. That's the meaning of the "new birth of freedom" the Great Emancipator talks about in his Gettysburg Address - the "unfinished work" he says we the living must carry on after the dead have been buried.

On the 100th anniversary of the battle, in July 1963, assistant Secretary of the Interior John Carver Jr., declared Gettysburg to be the place where "the ideals expressed by the Emancipator became possible of realization.

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" But there were still battles to be fought in the struggle for civil rights, and Carver had to add "the equality defined on this field has been withheld from millions of our fellow citizens."

A half century later, the election and re-election of a black president is an important milestone in that struggle, as were the battle and the subsequent healing words of our 16th president.

Those with an ear for history might hear in today's political battles the distant rumblings of that great rebellion a century and a half ago. There is again much talk of states' rights, of nullification of federal action and even of secession. Some would say the politics of race and disunion continue to tear at our national fabric.

But the election to the highest office in the land of a man who would more likely have been a slave in the America of Abraham Lincoln is surely a sign that we are winning the war against inequality. Gettysburg should remind us all that we can transcend the differences that divide us. As Lincoln said on the eve of war at his first inauguration:

"We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

What better place for a president to speak to a divided nation anxious to find common ground than the hallowed ground at Gettysburg?

- By The Hanover Evening Sun, member of Digital First Media Pennsylvania editorial board